SINKHOLES MAKE FLORIDIANS NERVOUS

OBSERVATIONS FROM NORTHERN FLORIDA
On March 1, 2013, the tragic story of Jeff Bush, a 37 year old local man who was tragically swallowed up in a sinkhole, near Brandon, in Hillsborough County, near Tampa Florida, hit the press. Since then, similar fearful stories have abounded here in northern Florida and across the nation. Sinkholes, the collapse of overlying rock and debris into unknown and virtually unpredictable subterranean voids caused by chemical solution of basement rock, are surprisingly very common, here in Florida and around the world wherever limestone beds occur below the surface. Some stories are more bizarre and frightening than others, and some, like the process itself, go back to into ancient times.

One of the most bizarre stories of sinkholes and human reaction to them, was recorded early in the First Century by the Roman historian Livy. Titus Livus Patavinus, (Livy) 58 BC to 17AD was a Roman historian whose masterwork was a history of Rome, entitled, "Ad Urba Condita”, (or “From the Founding of the City”). Livy lived during the period of the Roman Republic into the reign of Augustus. In the early books of "Ad Urba Condita", Livy tells of a “chasm” that opened up in center of the Roman Forum in 362BC. The feature seems to have characteristics of what we would call today a sinkhole. (However, since there is no limestone or significant other carbonate rocks in the Forum region, the chasm was NOT a true sinkhole). Livy's historic aim was to teach moral lessons to his Roman readers, and often padded his stories to that aim, so he may have transposed the elements of one story into another in the process changing the venue of the story to that of the Roman Forum.

According to Livy, the "chasm" formed in the very center of the Roman Forum, the heart of Rome's religious and commercial center. The depression continued to collapse and grow, quickly widening so as to threaten the foundations of a cluster of sacred and commercial buildings nearby. The citizenry were understandably terrified. Based on the minimal knowledge of the physical world at that time, they could only conclude that the gods were angry with Rome (perhaps due to the recent wars of aggression it had waged) and with its citizenry and must be propitiated with votive offerings. To please the angry deities, the people tossed various belongings into the hole, jewels, gold, brass trinkets, and they made animal sacrifices at the near-by Temple of Vesta. Their offerings and prayers were to no avail, the hole continued to grow wider and deeper. The frightened populace sought out augurs or priestly soothsayers to interpret the will of the angry gods. The augurs, who each carried a short wooden wand curved at its end into a spiral, and used these wands like divining rods as they studied the flight of flocks of birds, or the twists and turns of the the entrails of a sacrificed animal to make their predictions and pronouncements. Shortly, the priests announced the results of their divinations, stating,”the gods will be satisfied with only ’the most precious thing of all’". The citizenry puzzled over the statement. Entreaties went out to the city's wealthy elites, for more meaningful and worthy sacrifices and more valuable goods to satisfy the tastes of the Roman pantheon. Some of these wealthy worthies gathered their families then slunk off to their retreats in Campania, or Naples, to get away from the City and the angry gods, while others less willing to retreat, reluctantly gave up new offerings which they claimed to be “the most valuable of all". But nothing stopped the sinkhole from widening and collapsing, as earth continued to slip down into a large void beneath the heart of the City.

It was at that point that a young equite, Marcus Curtius, came forward with is own interpretation of the augurs’ divinations. Marcus was a member of the privileged class who went into battle mounted on a horse (hence the term "equite") and bore the name of a famous and ancient Sabine family. The Curtius family (or gens) was one of the founding one-hundred families of Rome. Young Marcus reasoned that the augur's statement, "the most precious thing of all" was clearly the strength and courage Rome's soldiers, who defended the City from its enemies and were responsible for its very existence. “We would not be here were it not for our courageous fighting men”, explained Marcus. “They are the most valuable of all.” The very next day, the young man dressed himself and his mount in their finest military equipment, preparing himself and his favorite stallion as a human and equine sacrifice for his native City. Then, with the morning sun reflecting brightly off his polished brass cuirass, his greaves and plumed helmet, he urged his horse into a galloped his down the center of the Sacred Way of the Forum. Reaching the edge of the sinkhole, he pulled back on his beautiful steed’s mane, and drove his heels hard into its soft flanks as they both leaped into the great sinkhole. Horse and rider disappeared almost instantly. As Marcus’ plumed helmet disappeared below the shifting, pale-yellow sand, the walls of the sinkhole stopped collapsing and the earth stopped moving.

The amazed citizenry rushed to the very edge of the depression and stared down into the vacant, now stable abyss. Nothing stirred at the bottom. There was no sign or sound of Marcus or his horse. The bottom remained stable. But slowly, during that first day water percolated up from far below to soak the loose bottom sand. In time, the depression slowly filled with water to form a lake, eventually known as Lacus Curtius, named after the young man who sacrificed himself and his horse for his City. Later, as is a normal part of the natural progression of lakes, the lake edges became lined by sedges and marsh grasses which slowly grew toward the center as the lake evolved into a marsh. That part of the Forum remained as a low marshy area with a pool of fresh water in the very center until near recent times. Note that there are several other myths and ancient accounts regarding how Marcus Curtius died, this is one of them.

The history of Rome and Livy's recounting of Marcus Curtius' sacrifice and the Roman Forum is little known here. But when "In The News” (ITN) reported the events surrounding Jeff Bush's tragic death on March 1, many in Florida listened listened attentively. ITN recounted how Jeff's older brother, who lived in the same house, was awakened around 11 PM by anguished screams coming from his brother's bedroom. When the elder Bush reached his brother's bedroom door, he found it ajar. Inside he was shocked to find nothing there, no floor, no furniture, no bed, only a deep churning earth-filled hole in the center of the room. In the dim light, he recounted how he could see his brother, entangled in bed-linens and mattress as he was being dragged downward, with other room debris, sucked into a dark, growling, sandy abyss. Bush tried to reach his sibling, but the sand gave way under his feet as the sinkhole widened. When emergency services arrived, they were able to extract the elder Bush from a portion of flooring on the edge of the still growing hole, but Jeff Bush was no longer visible. Emergency crews working from outside the building cautiously dropped cables with listening devices into the widening hole in an attempt to hear the buried man, and ascertain if he was still alive, but the only sounds they detected was the grinding of rocks and debris and the flow and swirl of moving sand, as the sinkhole continued to enlarge and deepen. Very quickly the depression widened to encompass an area 100 feet wide, threatening to swallow up the entire Bush house and possibly neighboring homes as well. Jeff Bush was not heard from again and is presumed dead. (See “In The News” http://inthenews.biz/2013/03/01/florida-man-Jeff-bush-trapped-inside-sinkhole-is-presumed-dead/).

Sinkholes are collapse structures common in areas underlain by limestone rock. About 20% of the nation has basement rock of this variety. Limestone is formed mostly as a result of biochemical processes under sea water and is composed of calcium carbonate. Limestones react with slightly acidic groundwater to produce calcium salts and carbon dioxide. When this reaction occurs it alters the solid crystalline rock into a tiny pinch of soluble salt and a belch of carbon dioxide gas, thus creating an empty space where solid rock had formerly existed. Naturally acidic rainwater (its acidity is the result of falling through air laced with carbon dioxide), seeps through the porous overlying rock to dissolve limestone and to eventually produce large voids or empty spaces in the formerly solid rock. These are known as “dissolution” cavities. Over long periods of time, these voids expand and coalesce into larger spaces which may further enlarge into caves and eventually into massive caverns such as those of world-famous Carlsbad Caverns in News Mexico, and other similar caverns found world wide. The final phase of the solution processes, when much of the underlying limestone has been dissolved away, leaves an irregular pock marked form of topography with isolated hills and elongated valleys known as "karst topography". Karst topography is found over wide areas of southern, central and western Florida, and many other states in the nation. In Florida, many large urban developments have been built directly over these areas, and so we can expect to continue to hear more of sinkholes swallowing cars, people and houses in the future.

If the limestone beds with their caves and caverns are close enough to the surface, as in most of Florida, where typically, the limestone bedrock is covered with between sixty to one hundred feet of friable rock or loose sand and shelly gravel, sinkholes can and do form at the surface. This collapse process occurs when, for one or more reasons, the roof of the subterranean cave, cavern or empty space underground can no longer support the overlying rock and it collapses down into the subsurface carrying down with it the overlying sand and gravel--and any man-made structures perched on it or located nearby. The presence of these deep, hidden,underground features which can lie undetected beneath a seemingly solid, placid, earth surface which without notice or warning can collapse bringing down with it man made structures which we imagine to be solid and unmoving in a wink of an eye. Thus the formation of sinkholes remain mysterious, unpredictable and frightening events.

Almost every state has some areas of this rock type and so the encounters described above are more common than most of us suspect, in part as a result of the fact that more and more of the nation's land is occupied by housing, parking lots, roadways, factories, shops, etc., making the likelihood of humans or their structures being affected by a subsurface collapse or sinkholes more and more likely. Furthermore, long term droughts, something we have been suffering from here in Florida, and the heavy pumping of groundwater reserves, or the “mining” of groundwater ( i. e. for “spring water”) for commercial bottling plants for example, and for other purposes can lower ground water tables and exacerbate the collapse process by reducing internal water pressure in the rock structures underground. It is also possible that increased groundwater acidity, and other human activities may also be part of the cause.

Get the picture?
rjk

GERRYMANDERED GOP BAD FOR PARTY AND NATION

The Problem with the GOP is gerrymandered districting.

GOP gerrymandered districts have made the Republican Party a minority party that can not compete or function nationally.

Today, after losing soundly to the Democrats in the last Presidential election the Grand Old Party is struggling with its looser image. Their recent efforts to “change” are more an effort to alter the packaging than the content of their agenda. What most of the Republican stalwarts are proposing would be akin to Kellogg's, ripping the "Corn Flakes" wrapper off boxes of its corn-based cereal and labeling them "Cheerios"-- an oat cereal that lowers cholesterol and sells better. It can be done, but besides being dishonest and irritating to the consumer, would they sell more corn? Or would the Republicans attract more voters with their similar form of dissembling? Would it help them win national elections? Not likely. As soon as the lie became apparent there would be a swift and violent blow back by a disgruntled electorate and the party would be back where they started. Furthermore, today’s modern technology (ubiquitous cell phones, coupled with wifi and Youtube) make it very difficult for even slick politicians to take one position with one element of his or her electorate and a totally different position with another. Thankfully as a nation we abhor liars. One need just recall the secret video tape made of candidate Mitt Romney spouting off about the 47% “moochers” at a private dinner party for his deep pocketed supporters and attempting to represent himself in a completely different light to the national audience.

The problem is that the GOP is not winning NATIONAL ELECTIONS, but IS winning congressional seats. They win many of them. In fact they win them handily and repeatedly in their highly gerrymandered Congressional Districts. In gerrymandered districts, which create non-typical voting blocks by carving out a selected electorate by following residences of these voters into closed communities, affluent sea-side or lake-side areas, and skipping working class and industrial areas and road and rail corridors. The result are congressional districts which are weird-shaped dragon-like monstrosities. The candidates have satisfied their personal needs for reelection and continued perks of power and office but they have also created a serious problem for themselves and the nation. They have painted themselves into the proverbial corner, in other words--into districts with virtually no minority or progressive voters. The Republican congressmen and women who are elected from these super-safe districts, as a result of their own efforts, now face a highly homogeneous electorate with a distinctly minority focused agenda. The districts which the state legislatures have carved out of many state populations are the wealthiest, whitest, most conservative, most Republican elements of a state and now each Congressperson must face only these atypical groups in their primaries and in the elections. How can such a legislator make a compromise or a "turn about" and dump some of this electorate’s most cherished positions ---on the Second Amendment, on abortion, on foreign policy, on immigration, on the deficit, on health care, etc., etc. The Republicans in these safe, walled-off districts are now stuck with the gerrymandered monster they created. And they will be for a long time to come, if the nation’s courts do not act to force them to redistrict. As a result of their own machinations in creating safe districts, the Republican Party is and will remain a representative of a very small national minority and may be relegated to the “wilderness” of second party status for some time to come.

And we as a nation are saddled (our English friends might describe this as “lumbered”) with a do-nothing, dysfunctional government that can not legislate a compromise solution to any of our major problems, domestic, foreign or economic. The nation’s political system is stymied, hidebound by the intransigence of the GOP “safe seat” holders who in turn are held captive by a highly conservative minority group that represent a smaller percentage of the voice of the nation’s electorate, but due to gerrymandering districts send a greater number of congressmen and women to Washington, than their actual numbers deserve. The GOP, and the Supreme Court, have created a monster that we all must suffer with for perhaps decades to come.
Get the picture?

rjk

ON HUGO CHAVEZ, A REVOLUTIONARY FOR ALL SEASONS

Hugo Chavez, died March 5, of this year after a long illness. He was vilified for little reason here in the US, but he was an enormously popular leader in Venezuela where he worked diligently to correct long-over due economic disparities between rich and poor. The modern world would be a better place were more leaders to address injustice with Chavez's determination.

Hugo Chavez was often maligned here in the USA, before and after his death. (The New York Post’s crude front page reported his passing with the blazing headline: “Venezuela bully Chavez is dead, Off Hugo”). The Post was simply following a decade long trend of Government and mass media anti-Chavez sentiment. Chavez had been long ago placed on our government’s enemies list, mostly due to his determination to prevent the big US and international oil companies from siphoning off huge profits from Venezuela’s rich oil fields. He also irritated us when he openly befriended some of our “straw dog” enemies. Not to mention thumbing his nose (or worse) at George Bush, whom he famously tagged in a UN speech as “el diablo” for that president's unnecessary, illegal, invasion of Iraq. Chavez did not endear himself to Washington as one of the few national leaders who openly and courageously opposed GWB's tragic act of bloodletting and waste of life and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another bone of contention between the two nations was the 2002 abortive, CIA-instigated attempted right wing coup to overthrow Chavez. After that incident, “el commandante” turned more completely away from the US (what ele could he do?) and relations soured. But the intensity of the US vilification of Chavez issuing from the US propaganda mill and Washington's media echo-chambers was more revealing than the actual allegations (demagoguery, socialism, communist sympathizer, incompetence, etc., etc.). Because, not only did Chavez have the temerity to pull Uncle Sam’s beard when he closed off Venezuela’s oil fields to foreign corporations, but he actually took the money the big oil companies would have stuffed into their own coffers, and had the effrontery to plow those funds back into Venezuela’s own economy! He invested petro dollars in Venezuela’s poor, building his nation's infrastructure, improving its education system, expanding its health care , and modernizing its agriculture. That was just too good of an idea to permit out in the free air to possibly contaminate the minds of leaders of other US “client states” or "dictators”. For US business interests here it was too dangerous and trendy an idea. Helping the poor, improving education, nutrition, health care and and basic social welfare was “socialistic” for Washington. (Perhaps the idea of skimming profits from hugely profitable oil companies might be the way the US could support our own crumbling infrastructure and mend the holes in our shabby social safety net too! That idea would have been exceptionally distasteful to the Bush crowd.)

Nancy Folbre, an economist from University of Mass., Amherst, (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/chavismo-and-human-development-in-venezuela/) writes in the NY Times March 11, 2013 an essay concerning Chavez’s economic achievements. I reproduce much of it below.

“Strong aversion to both his political values and his personal style has often led to dismissive assessments of Venezuela’s economic record since he became president in 1999. But as Mark Weisbrot and Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research have carefully documented, the Venezuelan economy experienced significant growth after 2003, when the Chávez government successfully gained control over the national petroleum industry, and fared surprisingly well even after oil prices collapsed in 2008.

Oil revenues were used to finance large public investments in health, education, housing, pensions and food subsidies to the poor. World Bank indicators show a sharp decline in poverty from slightly more than 60 percent in 2003 to slightly more than 30 percent in 2011.

Many projects or “misiones” that Mr. Chávez put into place proved so popular that even Henrique Capriles, his opponent in the last election, promised voters he would maintain and augment them.

While some critics of Mr. Chávez suggest that his policies have not had much impact on other Latin American countries, others contend that they are not that different from those carried out by other social democratic governments in the region, like Brazil’s. The influential Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, past president of Brazil, has lauded Mr. Chávez’s contribution to regional initiatives.

The impact that Mr. Chávez had on other left-leaning governments in the region, especially in Bolivia and Ecuador, certainly represents part of his political legacy.

Economists have not yet developed very good tools for assessing the impact of specific development policies, partly because these are intrinsically difficult to measure. The United Nations collects data on a number of different indexes, including the Human Development Index, which combines information on income, life expectancy and actual and expected years of education.

This index shows Venezuela closely aligned with a regional average that has increased steadily since 1980. But this index is not very sensitive to short-run policy changes; both life expectancy and actual years of schooling are variables that change only gradually as the population ages.

A better indicator of short-run improvements in health is the infant mortality rate. Data collected by the Central Intelligence Agency and aggregated on Index Mundi show significant declines in Venezuela between 2003 and 2012 – but even faster declines in Brazil, Mexico and Peru.

The same database helps explain why Venezuela’s exchange of subsidized oil for Cuban health care may deliver important future benefits. Infant mortality in Cuba, slightly higher than that in the United States in 2003, has now fallen below the United States average.

Mr. Chávez’s track record in increasing school enrollments does stand out among comparable countries. A detailed World Bank database shows that between 2003 and 2011 Venezuela narrowed the gap in gross school enrollments (number of students enrolled compared with those eligible for enrollment) between it and Brazil, Mexico and Peru (the percentage of primary school enrollments held even).

Even more striking are the effects of one particular hallmark of Chavismo: the expansion of free public higher education. Tertiary enrollments increased to about 80 percent in 2009 (the latest year for which data are available) from 40 percent in 2003, far higher levels than those of Brazil, Mexico or Peru.”

Get the picture of why Chavez was on our enemy list and our CIA actively attempted to oust him? The US government would have clearly preferred a more “business friendly" leader (i.e. a dictator of their own) in Venezuela, so we could better control what is considered the largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia. This form of intervention on behalf of our business class has been a normal pattern of our "foreign policy" in South America and elsewhere. It has also caused untold loss of life, economic turmoil, pain and suffering around the world. Will we never learn our lesson? We can count off the failed states, bloody wars and deposed legitimate democratic leaders around the world where we have been manipulating governments for the benefit of a small clique of wealthy industrialists. These special interests, these oligarchs were the very same elements Hugo Chavez had the courage to oppose successfully in Venezuela. We need less blather, less flag waving and obfuscation from our media and more clarity of what forward leaning progressive leaders like Chavez have accomplished, (and perhaps what we can emulate here) and as French Minister of Overseas Territories, Victorin Lurel, stated after attending the Chavez funeral: the world "needs more dictators like Chavez" and this author agrees heartily.

rjk